The folks over at Point Topic have released their latest research, announcing that we’re using the web more, and not just the text parts of it. Over the last two years, the web has increasingly become a feast for eyes and ears – with the increase the amount of high quality pictures, audio and video being driven by leaps in broadband penetration - and the UK is leading the way in video adoption. Companies like Brightcove are helping media companies to get their content available online, but once it’s there, how are we to find it?

Most media uploaded to the web is tagged with metadata, so that it can be found through traditional search engines - this is the way that Google Image search works. But some very creative start-ups are set to change the way we think about search online, making it a much more human experience.

Video search pioneers blinkx look at every characteristic of video to understand the content – from soundtrack and speech elements, to the images on screen as well as embedded information. Being able to seperate content in this variety of ways more closely maps the way we as humans understand the world.

Meanwhile, retrievr, which has had some nice pick up in the blogosphere, is a neat little tool that allows you to search through photos in the popular sharing site flickr, by what they look like, rather than a description of what they are. Of course neither of these tools perfectly match the way we absorb the world around us, but they go a long way in making the web a more human place.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 4:03 pm by Lewis Webb and is filed under Broadband, General, Video, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.